Some historical background to Math Research at Bell Labs

I spent a fair amount of after-hour time at BL Archives 1Q 2016 digging up material for Shannon's Centennial (access to the archive thanks to Ed Eckert and Charlie Bahr) Eventually helped create https://www.bell-labs.com/claude-shannon/ Perhaps even more interesting than the Shannon source material was the story of Math Research at Bell Labs (which among other things predated Bell Labs!) Here are highlights of some nuggets to point the way forward.